


i'd rather fuel a fantasy than deal with this alone

by Quintessentia



Series: Hitman!AU [1]
Category: Septiplier - Fandom, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Other Tags Will Be Added As The Series Progresses, there will be smut later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 12:29:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6329185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quintessentia/pseuds/Quintessentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack was a recluse who lived alone. Mark was an assassin. The universe has other plans for them. (Soulmate/Hitman AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'd rather fuel a fantasy than deal with this alone

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Note: This is a soulmate AU in which people find their soulmates the first time their eyes meet in person. It occurs after Mark and Jack have met and is set in a universe in which Mark is an assassin and Jack is kind of a recluse. It’s going to be confusing, but i’ll probably write more eventually if anyone likes it. 
> 
> This work is based entirely off of earthbooty's Criminal AU septiplier fanart on tumblr. It's absolutely amazing and I recommend you go check out all of their work, because I'm afraid I did not do it justice.
> 
> Title from Talk Me Down by Troye Sivan.

The moment Mark strides back into the hotel room, Jack knows he’s been sent another mission.

He looks up from his laptop where he’s comfortably curled up in the middle of their king size bed, wrapped in blankets with his music on low volume. It’s raining throughout most of Italy, and even though Jack loves the sound of thunderstorms, he hasn’t been able to relax since they’d arrived the day before.

Whenever Mark announces that he’s ‘getting an itch’ and needs a change of scenery, it’s often code for something completely different. Jack’s been tagging along with him for almost six months now and he’s been to more places in that short amount of time than he’d ever dreamed were on a map, but it’s not without a price.

Every time Mark tells him to pack his bags, it means someone new has to die.

His soulmate is an assassin—and a damn prolific one at that. Jack had been a quiet, unassuming individual living in a cabin in the woods for years on his own before Mark had accidentally come sneaking into his house late one night. His lover had been searching for his next target, but the vast expanse of nothingness surrounding the coordinates he’d been given had made it difficult to track the man he’d been looking for.

Instead, he’d ended up in Jack’s bedroom, brandishing a gun that was very real and _very_ terrifying in the face of a man so startled and confused he’d almost cried. Jack’s not particularly proud of his slightly dramatic reaction to almost being shot to death, but then again it had been weeks since he’d last had human contact that wasn’t from a shopkeeper or a stranger on the street. Finding an incredibly aggressive and attractive man lurking in his house and plotting to kill him probably would have made a well adjusted man shit himself, and Jack wasn’t anything anywhere close to well adjusted.

Jack watches Mark rifle through his electronics case like he knows exactly what he’s searching for, and remembers the way Mark’s face had fallen dramatically the first time he’d looked into Jack’s eyes. For a seasoned assassin, any lapse in judgment or emotion might have meant immediate death or capture, but Jack had been the only one around for miles, and Mark hadn’t had the luxury of being able to shoot and abandon the man he’d just discovered to be his soulmate.

They’ve been together for months and in all their time together, Jack has seen Mark do some terrible and incredible things with what looked like minimum effort. His mind is consistenly blown by the semantics of Mark’s everyday life, but never has anything turned his life upside down like the first time he looked into Mark’s eyes.

Jack had heard the spiel from his parents, siblings, ex-friends, anyone who ever had anything to say about their experience with finding their soulmate, and each of them had said the same thing: whoever you’d been before the moment you locked eyes with the other person, didn’t matter anymore.

That had been something Jack hadn’t been able to fathom. He’d practically been a recluse—he worked from home and played video games in his spare time. He rarely got out and his friends were few and far away, miles upon miles from his lonely cabin in the woods. No one would want to be tied down to someone with no life, no ambition, and no skills to speak of.

Of course, he’d expected that his ‘big, earth-shattering moment’ might happen with a random person at the supermarket or when he inevitably ran into someone face first in the street, not with a hitman led astray by inaccurate coordinates.

Mark had pointed a gun in his face, looked him in the eye, and promptly dropped it right on Jack’s bedroom floor.

Later, he’d claim it as his ‘most humiliating and unprofessional moment’ and that Jack was one of very few people to have ever seen him in a state of such ridiculous vulnerability, but sometimes Jack wonders if he’ll ever get to see Mark that terrified again.

He knows that Mark never expected to find his soulmate, much less on the other end of the barrel of his gun, and he knows how afraid Mark had been in those first few moments.

Mark had explained that the moment their eyes had locked, he’d felt the floor fall out from underneath him, and he’d completely lost his grip on both his weapon and every ounce of emotional restraint he’d learned over the years. He’d thought for sure that he’d found his target, and by some horrifying stroke of fate, been sent to murder his own soulmate completely by accident.

Jack can only imagine what panic like that must do to a person, especially one who’d spent years training himself out of feeling fear.

“Mark?” he asks, removing one earbud while he watches his lover untangle a fistful of cords with uncanny concentration. “Is everything okay, babe?”

Mark looks at him like he’s just now noticed that Jack is in the room at all, and then the guilt follows, smoothing out the creases on his forehead and softening the tension in his jaw. It’s an expression he only ever uses around Jack, because he’s made it evidently clear over the past few months that guilt is not an emotion he’s particularly familiar with either.

“Everything’s fine, Jack.”

Mark never apologizes, or at least he doesn’t unless it’s Jack he’s hurt, but the other man is clearly in a mood of sorts, and Jack can feel his anxiety from across the room.

“You don’t look fine.”

Tact isn’t something that works effectively against Mark, and Jack stopped bothering after about a week of knowing him.

“I’ll let you know when I’m not fine, okay?” Mark raises an eyebrow at him and the guilt is still evidently there, only thinly veiled by Mark’s attempts to appear nonchalant. Jack disconnects himself from his computer and emerges from his nest of blankets, wincing as his back cracks from lack of movement.

He approaches Mark, catching sight of his own mussed hair and the rumpled sweatpants/t-shirt combo he’s been sporting since sometime yesterday evening. Mark had promised to take him somewhere nice once the weather cleared up, but Jack immediately gets the feeling that he’s going to have to take a rain check on those particular plans.

“Baby,” Jack’s hands close gently over Mark’s, stopping his lover’s attempts to re-assemble an earpiece of some sort. “Tell me what’s going on. You’ve been quiet and stressed out ever since you told me we were coming here to Italy, and now you’re acting like a bomb’s about to go off somewhere. I’m not an idiot—I know when something’s not right with you.”

Mark stares at where Jack’s linking their hands around the dark metal and plastic of his high dollar electronics, and sighs like all of his problems are connected directly to the mess of wires between them.

“My target here is an old friend,” he says quietly, and Jack’s heart shatters just a little.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he replies, and then he’s moving, untangling them both from Mark’s work and leading the other man towards the bed. Mark doesn’t fight him as he slams his laptop shut and slides it onto the nightstand, crawling backwards onto the sheets with their hands still intertwined.

“We’re talking about this,” he informs Mark as they settle together, Jack’s head on Mark’s chest, fingers brushing. “I’m not letting you out of this one that easily.”

Mark’s quiet for a moment, warm fingers dancing with Jack’s in a way that’s more a desire for comfort than anything else.

“There’s not much to talk about,” he says finally, words rumbling through his chest and against Jack’s skin. “He was a friend of mine before I was this deep in the mercenary business, he got involved in a bad crowd, dropped off the face of the earth and I haven’t heard from him in years. He popped up a few months ago on the agency’s radar and now they want me to track him, milk him for info if possible, then kill him. That’s it.”

His voice gives away so little, but Jack knows every inch of his soulmate, body and mind. He knows when Mark is struggling with himself, and this is definitely one of those times.

“Are ye gonna do it?” Jack rubs at the palm of Mark’s hand patiently, because even when he’s being indecisive, his lover hates to beat around the bush. Brutal honesty is the only option.

“I have to,” is the reply he gets, and Mark must turn his head, because there are lips on his forehead and Mark’s next words are quieter, warm against Jack’s skin.

“They don’t prepare you for these kinds of things, you know,” he says, and it’s almost-vulnerable and nearly inaudible. Mark’s voice _almost_ catches and it’s the almost that proves to Jack just how badly this must be wearing on Mark’s mind.

“I’d never want this to have to be something you’d need to know how to do on a regular basis,” Jack says honestly, meaning it. Mark’s job is terrible enough and Jack hates it with every fiber of his being because no matter how professional he may be, Mark can’t not bring the job home with him.

“Will you hate me if I go through with it?”

The question is so far out of left field that Jack tenses up, and he feels Mark’s breath catch in response.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asks, tilting his head away from Mark’s, as if being able to see him will suddenly make his words make more sense. “You kill people all the time—that’s not a secret, but just because I’m not in love with your job doesn’t mean I’m not in love with you.”

Mark’s breathing is shallow and the silence is so heavy Jack wonders if it’s actually obstructing their ability to think properly.

“Killing someone you used to know is different than killing someone you don’t care about,” Mark says shortly, shifting so his arm around Jack’s shoulders is gripping tighter. “I don’t want you to think I’m a machine. I—I want you to be comfortable around me. I want you to be able to trust me and not feel like you have to flinch every time you hear me loading a clip into a gun.”

Oh. _Oh._

“I’m not afraid of you,” Jack replies so quickly his words nearly trip over one another. “I stopped being afraid of you the moment I could see your face clearly back in my bedroom in the cabin in the woods. I’m afraid of what you can do to yourself and to other people, but I’m not afraid of what you can do to me.”

“Why?” Mark’s response is halted and gravelly. Confusion seeps through the layers of gruffness and disbelief in that one word and Jack sighs.

“You’ve never given me a reason not to trust you,” he says, turning so that he can lean up on one elbow and look at Mark for real. “You’re the only person I have, anyways. If it weren’t for you I’d still be hiding out in the woods without ever knowing what the world was like beyond my front doorstep.”

Mark stares at him. He looks exhausted and not for the first time, Jack wishes that being a hitman didn’t come with so much emotional baggage and so few constructive values. Mark has more than a decade of trauma behind him that even Jack doesn’t yet fully understand, and even though he makes every effort to remind Mark how he feels about him, it’s more than clear that very few of the trust issues flickering between them actually belong to Jack.

“I’m going to disappoint you one day,” Mark tells him quietly, and his eyes are kind of wide and filled with regret, like he’s imagining all of his future failures coming to life in front of him.

Jack slides until he’s lying directly on top of Mark, their chests pressing together as Jack’s thumb rubs gently at the soft skin of Mark’s temples. Warm hands move to grip at his back and hips and Jack cups Mark’s face in his hands.

“I didn’t sign up for perfection,” he replies, because Mark is an intelligent man, but he doesn’t understand people. Not really. “I’m here for _you_ , whomever that might be. If you don’t want me to think of you as a robot then you shouldn’t assume I want you to be perfect, yeah?”

Mark looks like he wants to argue, mostly because that’s always his first reflex in this kind of situation. Jack’s not stupid enough to think that he’s going to win this fight tonight—it takes more than a few finely crafted sentiments and soft touches to soothe away years of physical and emotional torment, and it’s not like Mark’s job is getting any easier.

Jack kisses him, slow and soft and everything he wishes they had time for during the day, when Mark’s out running around with his guns and Jack’s keeping track of his whereabouts using computer software and an earpiece.

Mark kisses him back, just like Jack knows he will because he’s never worried that Mark doesn’t love him, only that Mark doesn’t love him enough to come back alive when an assignment goes south.

The kiss doesn’t end so much as it just evolves into heavy breathing and their noses brushing together in the dimming light of the evening. Jack thinks he could happily stay here until they’re both unconscious, and then maybe continue the morning in the same fashion. Beds and hazy evenings have a way of making a person’s problems seem incredibly far away, and hotel beds are no different.

“I have to head out early tomorrow,” Mark says, and he sounds guilt stricken again. The shadows cast by the curtains and streetlamps obscure the way his remorse burrows its way into the fine lines of his face, but Jack hears it in his words nonetheless. “I might not see you.”

Jack shakes his head, pressing a row of kisses along Mark’s jawline, because he wants to end this conversation now and take advantage of the short hours they have together before Mark has to do the unspeakable tomorrow. He has a feeling things won’t be the same for a little while after that.

“I’ll see you off,” he whispers, lips grazing the shell of his soulmate’s ear. Mark shivers, like Jack knew he would. “You know you need me to watch your back out there, and I’m not leaving you on your own for even a second.”

Mark smiles just a little, and the only warning Jack gets before his lover flips them both smoothly into the bedcovers is Mark’s arms locking themselves around his waist.

Jack’s back hits the sheets and Mark pulls his own shirt off, and then Jack’s in perfect succession. He looms over Jack’s body, shadows scarring the smooth skin of his shoulders and arms holding the both of them in place. Jack traces the tattoos winding their way along the plains of Mark’s skin and breathes out, drinking in the feeling of being safe and exposed all at once under Mark’s eyes.

“I prefer it when you’re the little angel on my shoulder,” Mark says, and this close, his words make the air between the two of them electric. “But I don’t want you listening when I kill him—you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t ever have to see me like that.”

Jack’s thumbs loop through the hems of Mark’s jeans and he looks at him seriously.

“There’s very little of you I haven’t seen,” he says, the implied secondary meaning betraying the gravity of his voice. “I’d rather that neither of us started hiding things from each other now. I need to know you’re safe, and you need to know that I’m always there—I don’t want you going back to doing everything solo.”

Mark’s shoulders sag a bit.

“If you think I’m going to let you get caught up in the shit that my job brings—.”

Jack cuts him off. “I’m already way past involved in what you do, so let’s cut the self-sacrificing shit, okay? As long as I’m here—and I plan on that being forever,” he reminds him, tugging gently at the hem of Mark’s jeans and giving him a look. “Then there’s no reason you should be trying to keep me in the dark—I can’t help you if you don’t let me. It’s as simple as that.”

He very quietly hopes that Mark won’t bring up the fact that Jack is, in fact, terrified of anything involving weapons and close combat. He can’t bring himself to carry any kind of weapon on his person, and his hands had shook so much the first time Mark had tried to teach him how to shoot, he’d nearly blown his own foot off.

He prefers to be Mark’s eagle eye and voice of reassurance than his actual partner in crime out on the field. For one thing, he has little to no training in anything related to subduing or killing anyone, and for another, he doesn’t do confrontation very well at all—unless Mark is involved. The only thing Jack knows well is computers, and if he can put his expertise to use getting Mark the intel he needs and keeping him in contact with both Jack and the agency, then he considers himself a useful asset at the very least.

Mark raises an eyebrow at him like he seriously wants to mention the whole ‘being terrified of firearms’ thing, but instead he just closes his eyes and hangs his head.

“You’re going to make me regret this eventually, aren’t you?” he mutters, probably more to himself than to Jack. “You’re never going to let me keep you safe.”

Jack bites his lip and starts unbuttoning Mark’s jeans, because every time they start to have this conversation it goes in the same direction: absolutely nowhere.

“I’m not going to let you pretend to give me a normal life when you and I both know that’s not possible,” he says smoothly, coolly. “We’re not having this fight again. You know how I feel about it.”

Mark laughs, and it’s only slightly bitter.

“I know you’re trying to distract me,” he answers, shifting his hips so Jack can strip him bare without any hassle. “And you’re in luck, because I’m just tired enough not to care.” He kicks his jeans and boxers away until they’re a forgotten pile on the floor, and tugs at Jack’s sweatpants.

Jack catches him, and Mark glances at him, startled.

“I don’t wanna talk anymore,” he murmurs, skin buzzing with the desire to focus on something much, much more appealing than trust issues and murder missions. “I love ye and that’s not changing. You think you can let me do that?”

Mark slides Jack’s sweatpants off, this time unhindered by hands or words, and he slots himself between Jack’s spread legs, right where he belongs.

“Only if you promise to let me love you back,” he says, lips touching at Jack’s neck.

Jack pulls him as close as possible, and the friction makes them both gasp.

“You can have me,” he hums, and those are the last coherent words either of them exchanges until morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading, and please tell me what you think! I'm just now getting back into writing fanfiction after almost a year, and feedback is incredibly valuable to me! Don't forget to tell earthbooty how amazing their art is--all credit goes to them!


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